At long last, Doctor Who season 11 is now just around the corner. We’ve known that Jodie Whittaker will play the Thirteenth Doctor for well over a year now, but the BBC had been keeping details on the new era of the sci-fi institution on a short leash until very recently. Just this week, for instance, we finally got official confirmation of the premiere date.
Following that, a new short promo has now arrived to get us even more hyped for this latest incarnation of the Time Lord. The brief, 30 second teaser sees the Doctor standing in the middle of a grand chamber in which the ornate windows and ceiling suddenly cave in. As the camera zooms into Whittaker’s face, the time traveller grins at us and says, “whoops.”
It’s not hard to fathom the message the promo’s sending us here. The Thirteenth Doctor’s literally coming along to shatter the glass ceiling and have some fun while doing it. This playful reminder that Whittaker’s the first female lead of the show follows on from the announcement of the title for the first episode of season 11 – “The Woman Who Fell To Earth,” a smart pun on 1976’s The Man Who Fell To Earth starring David Bowie.
Conversely, despite the title and the promo, showrunner Chris Chibnall’s claimed that the new run won’t actually make that much of a deal out of the heroine’s gender swap. In particular, the premiere will mostly be “a story of survival” instead of one about the Doctor adjusting to being a woman. This makes sense when you remember that when we last saw No. 13, she’d fallen out of the TARDIS and was hurtling around in the atmosphere.
Doctor Who season 11 lands on our screens in exactly one month from today, and with promotion now in full swing, you can expect to see some more promos surfacing in the weeks to come.